During the Global Renaissance, an age of cultural and intellectual rebirth, the royal Mughal matriarchy were female powerhouses of immeasurable influence, setting cultural standards and gatekeeping trade. India, a self-sufficient agrarian economy, was flourishing within its golden age, whilst England, impoverished and isolated from Queen Elizabeth’s excommunication, faced a colossal mountain to climb in convincing India to trade with them. Most strikingly, it was Mughal India’s queens that presented a formidable force for England, as they yielded political and economic power, dominating trade relations with European powers.

The unrelenting energy and resourcefulness of the East India Company, the trading company that held monopoly for English trade in India, conveyed their desperation, yet struggle, to prove themselves valuable to India. In 1608, William Hawkins, an Englishman negotiating at the Mughal court, experienced the wrath of Empress Nur Jahan, lamenting that ‘without gifts and bribes nothing could either goe forward or bee accomplished’^[1]. Despite emulating Indian culture and even marrying an Indian wife, the self-identifying ‘English Khan’ failed to secure a trade treaty. Thomas Roe, who led the English embassy from 1615-1619, was at the mercy of Nur Jahan, also failing to charm her and negotiate a permanent trade treaty. Yet the Mughal Emperor Jahangir’s exceptionally severe punishment of the Portuguese in 1613 after they captured Empress Mariam-uz-Zamani’s lucrative vessel, the Rahimi, most explicitly demonstrated the unparalleled respect that imperial Mughal women held.

Idealised Portrait of the Mughal Empress Nūr Jahān, India, circa 1725-1750

Through these global interactions based on wealth and trade, England realised that this wealthy empire was not just vested in the king but, significantly, the queen. This inevitably translated into English celebratory portrayals of Indian queens as mistresses of wealth and gatekeepers of trade, which Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton demonstrates.

Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honour and Industry (1617) illustrates the civic pageant as a microcosm of the globality England was experiencing during the Renaissance. The pageant, an accessible and free form of entertainment, positions India upon the streets of London, creating an immediate cultural discourse and false sense of connection. Under a facade of celebrating the mayor, pageants were exploited as propaganda, advocating that trade with India could only be prosperous and profitable for all. Whilst Middleton’s juxtaposition of a masculine England and feminine India appeals to the familiar, heteronormative understanding of the domestic family, implying that the engagement with Indian trade was a healthy and wholesome endeavour.

It is Middleton’s portrayal of India as a stately and triumphant woman that I find most illuminating, as he evokes a burgeoning wealth and fertility tied into the discourse of India’s abundance. Adopting a classical presentation of India, Middleton conveys imagery of a Roman or Greek goddess upon her ‘illustrious chariot’ holding a ‘fair golden ball in her hand’^[2]. Utilising such familiar, classical images of power, Middleton demands uncontroversial respect for the feminine India, acknowledging her economical command over the world. Whilst the pageant’s lavish materialistic abundance explicitly associates India with an exuberant wealth, where India is depicted as a ‘rich personage’ accompanied by ‘Merchandise’ and ‘Industry’ (p.1256).

The East offering its riches to Britannia, Roma Spiridone, 1778. Source: British Library

Middleton deepens the image of a feminine India through the connection of human and nature demonstrated through the listing of spice trees and fruits. Imagining a fertile India bearing her natural resources, Middleton emphasises India’s maternal healing, but significantly, her economic growth. The children that played the company of Indians are synonymous with the spices, concluding that India was a sphere of fertile wealth and enrichment whilst adopting the role of a watchful mother. Significantly, Mughal elite women possessed power within both the private and public sphere, as historian Lisa Balabanililar concluded that ‘they displayed consistent involvement, not only in issues of family and succession but also in military and political concerns’.^[3]

Despite the sophisticated and convoluted language, Middleton’s flattering representation of a feminine India reflects the ultimate influence Mughal imperial women had, most notably concerning trade, exposing England’s economic agendas. This feminine India, ferocious yet esteemed, starkly contrasts later orientalist readings of women as sexualised, degraded and fetishised in the developed discourse to justify such brutal colonisation. Most convincingly, Lubaaba Al-Azami argues that the pageant disregards reductive readings of the Indian Queen as a sexual conquest, but instead ‘sexuality is framed as fertility, commodities as children and the Indian matriarch as its imperious owner and gatekeeper’.^[4] Here, we are not seeing a feminine India in terms of her ravishment, but a literal manifestation of the lived reality of English travellers’ experience of Indian queens’ power.

Although, as historical narratives are often written by euro-centric men, perhaps this apparent celebration of feminine power is limited. The pageant potentially mirrors a marriage ritual, cynically foreshadowing the colonial expansion to come. Masculine England celebrates his new bride, India, whilst equally establishing control and drooling over the commodities to consume and potential wealth to steal. This echoes the tradition of coverture whereby once married, a woman lost all ownership of her material goods and legal entity to her husband. However, unlike in England, Indian imperial women retained their wealth in marriage, often ruling as co-sovereigns; whereas the emperor spent on India, she spent on herself whilst raking in revenue through taxation from trade.

The long-standing love affair of England and India was primarily based on trade during the Renaissance with the Mughal market, gatekept by the Indian female elite, viewed as highly lucrative for European powers. Ultimately, the English civic pageantry celebrates the feminine power of India as an object of desire for trade, whilst acknowledging the crucial agency of Mughal matriarchs in shaping trade. Middleton offers a critical rethinking of gendered power dynamics in early modern commerce, complicating the conventional euro-centric narrative of global trade, where male monarchs are often foregrounded. As the English traveller bows down to the almighty Mughal Matriarchs, a refreshing power dynamic is ignited, one which is insightful yet ultimately disregarded far too often.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Al-Azami, Lubaaba, ‘‘Seat of Merchandise’: Staging Indian Trade in The Triumphs of Honour and Industry’, in Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama, ed. M. Öğütcü & A. Hussain, (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2023), pp. 135–156

Al-Azami, Lubaaba, Travellers in the Golden Realm: How Mughal India Connected England to the World, (London: John Murray Publishers, 2024)

Balabanlilar, Lisa, ‘The Begims of the Mystic Feast: Turco-Mongol Tradition in the Mughal Harem.’, in The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 69, no. 1, (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 123–47

Gould, Rebecca, ‘How Gulbadan Remembered: The “Book of Humāyūn” as an Act of Representation’, in Early Modern Women, vol. 6, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 187–193

Harris, Jonathan Gil, Indography : Writing the Indian in Early Modern England, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

Lal, Ruby, ‘Rethinking Mughal India: Challenge of a Princess’ Memoir.’, in Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 38, no. 1, (Economic and Political Weekly, 2003), pp. 53–65

Markham, Clements Robert, ‘The Voyage of William Hawkins in 1530’, in The Hawkins’ Voyages During the Reigns of Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, and James I, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Middleton, Thomas, The Triumphs of Honour and Industry, ed. David M. Bergeron, (London: Nicholas Okes, 1617), pp.1253-1263

O’Callaghan, Michelle, ‘The Playwright as Craftsman: Middleton’s Civic Pageants’, in Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) pp. 90–103

Said, Edward, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978)

Singh, Jyotsna G., ‘Boundary Crossings in the Islamic World: Princess Gulbadan as Traveler, Biographer, and Witness to History, 1523—1603’, in Early Modern Women, vol. 7, (Chicago: The university of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 231–40

Singh, Jyotsna G., A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, ed. Jyotsna G. Singh, (Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009)

 Website:

Medieval and Early Modern Orients: Mughal Empire https://memorients.com/mughal-empire

Lucy Morgan is studying English Literature in her final year at The University of Manchester, currently researching and writing her dissertation on The American New Woman in the 19th century. She also has written published articles for digital editorial publications and her University newspaper within lifestyle, opinion and fashion sections. Her instagram is lucymorgann14

[1] Clements Robert Markham, ‘The Voyage of William Hawkins in 1530’ in The Hawkins’ Voyages During the Reigns of Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, and James I, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

[2] Thomas Middleton, The Triumphs of Honour and Industry, ed. David M. Bergeron, (London: Nicholas Okes, 1617), p.1256.

[3] Lisa Balabanlilar, ‘The Begims of the Mystic Feast: Turco-Mongol Tradition in the Mughal Harem’ in The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 69, no. 1, (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p.133.

[4] Lubaaba Al-Azami, ‘”Seat of Merchandise”: Staging Indian Trade in The Triumphs of Honour and Industry’, in M. Öğütcü & A. Hussain (Ed.). Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2023), p.149.